On the afternoon of December 23, 1985, two days before Christmas, Pasco County sheriff's officers found Suzanne Henry dead in her home in Zephyrhills, Pasco County, Florida. She had been stabbed in the throat, and her body had been covered with a rug and left near the living room couch. Her son, Eugene Christian, five years old, was not in the house. He had last been seen there the day before.
The man the officers went looking for was her husband, John Ruthell Henry, a 34-year-old unemployed bricklayer who was living with another woman. One of the detectives had known him for years. Ten years earlier he had stabbed a woman named Patricia Roddy to death, pleaded to second-degree murder and gone to prison. He had been out on parole for about two years.
Henry was convicted of all three killings. He was tried twice for each of the two 1985 deaths, sentenced to death four times, and spent about 23 years on Florida's death row. In the last weeks of his life his lawyers argued that he was intellectually disabled and could not be executed, a claim given new force by a United States Supreme Court decision that came out three weeks before his execution date. The state and federal courts rejected it, and Florida executed him on June 18, 2014.
The record on Henry's early life is thin, and almost all of it comes from his own lawyers and the mental health experts they called. The Florida Commission on Capital Cases gave his date of birth as January 16, 1951, and listed him as a Black man. A trial court in the early 1990s accepted, as a mitigating factor, that Henry had fallen as a child and suffered some brain injury, and that he had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In 2014 his lawyers described an "abhorrent childhood" and a family history of mental illness; a psychologist they relied on, Dr. Bill Mosman, attributed his difficulties to post-concussion syndrome and a traumatic brain injury suffered during what the lawyers called a severely abusive childhood. The same filing said Henry had suffered delusions and hallucinations from as early as age 10. None of these childhood claims was tested at a hearing, and no court made findings about them beyond the brain-injury mitigator.
Henry took an IQ test in the mid-1980s, after his arrest, and scored 78. Sources differ on whether the test was given in 1986 or 1987. At his first trials, a psychologist, Dr. Robert Berland, testified that he was "actively psychotic" when he killed his wife, and a psychiatrist, Dr. Walter Afield, said he suffered from long-term, very severe chronic paranoia and had a serious drug and alcohol problem, but could tell right from wrong. Afield also told the first jury he thought Henry was "a very dangerous man."
Patricia Roddy was 28 years old in 1976, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The newspapers and the courts describe her relationship to Henry in different ways: the Tampa Bay Times called her his girlfriend, the Associated Press his common-law wife, and the Florida Supreme Court and the federal appeals court his first wife. The Eleventh Circuit called her Patty. She had children. Little else about her life appears in the sources found for this page.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Henry stabbed her about 20 times in the front seat of a car while her children sat in the back, and one of them pleaded with him to stop hurting their mother. Years later, under cross-examination at his 1992 retrial, Henry agreed that the killing happened in a car, said he had been drinking, and said he and Roddy had been alone in the car. Asked whether there were children in the back seat, he said, "I am positive" there were not. He said he knew of her wounds only from what he had been told. The prosecutor at that retrial put the killing in 1975; the newspapers and most court records give 1976.
Two eyewitnesses, Deborah Fuller and Gloria Nix, described the killing in later court proceedings, and a police investigator, Leonard Harris, examined the scene. One link between the two cases stands out in the record: Fay Wilber, the detective who arrested Henry for Roddy's death in 1976, was the same Pasco County detective who questioned him in 1985.
Henry turned himself in for Roddy's killing, a fact a sentencing judge later counted in his favor. The courts and the press disagree on the form of his plea. Two Florida Supreme Court opinions say he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder; a 2006 opinion and the Associated Press say he pleaded no contest. A Reuters report in 2014 said he had served time for manslaughter, which conflicts with every court record. He received a 15-year sentence.
Henry served about seven and a half years, half of the 15-year term. The Tampa Bay Times reported that he was a model inmate who seemed to improve while in prison. He was released in 1983 and was on parole when the next killings happened. After his release, the paper reported, he went back to using drugs and had charges pending against him.
At some point after his release he married Suzanne. Her relatives told reporters in 2014 that she did not know, when she married him, that he had killed someone.
The sources found for this page say less about Suzanne Henry and her son than about the man who killed them. Suzanne had been married before, and Eugene Christian was her son from that marriage. He was five in December 1985. The house in Zephyrhills was one she and Henry had shared, but by that winter they were separated and Henry was living with another woman, Rosa Mae Thomas, and Thomas's daughter, Stephanie.
Suzanne's niece, Selena Geiger, was young when her aunt and cousin died. Nearly three decades later she said she still remembered the confusion of that day and carried it with her. After the execution she held up a photograph of Suzanne and Eugene for the reporters outside the prison. "These are the victims," she said. "These are the ones we need to remember."
Suzanne Henry and Eugene Christian were both white, according to the Death Penalty Information Center's execution records.
What is known about the killings comes mainly from Henry's own confession, as the Florida Supreme Court summarized it, and from the evidence at his trials.
Henry went to the Zephyrhills house before noon on Sunday, December 22, 1985. He said he had come to talk with Suzanne about what to buy Eugene for Christmas. He had no money, according to trial evidence, and he later testified that he had used cocaine earlier that day at a pool hall. The two of them argued about his living with Rosa Thomas. Henry told detectives that when he refused to leave, Suzanne came at him with a kitchen knife and cut him three times on the left arm, that they "tussled," and that he "freaked out," took the knife from her and stabbed her. She was stabbed thirteen times in the neck. Testimony at his retrial indicated that he sat on her, struck her and held her head back, and that she remained conscious for three to five minutes after the last wound.
He covered her body and went to another room, where Eugene was watching television. According to the Tampa Bay Times, he covered the boy's face as he took him out of the house. He put Eugene in the car and drove into Hillsborough County, toward Plant City. They stopped so that he could buy the boy a snack, which the Times reported was fried chicken, and so that he could buy beer and cocaine for himself. His girlfriend later testified that he had sold jewelry to pay for the cocaine; Suzanne's gold jewelry was missing from the house. He smoked some of the cocaine as he drove.
On the way back toward Zephyrhills, Henry said, he thought he saw flashing lights behind him, believed the police were following him, and turned off into an isolated area near a chicken farm. The car got stuck in mud. He and Eugene got out and walked a short distance. He smoked more cocaine while holding the boy on his knee, and then he stabbed him five times in the neck. About nine hours had passed since Suzanne's death. Henry said he thought about killing himself but could not do it. He walked around for a while, dropped the knife in a field, walked back to Zephyrhills, changed his clothes at Rosa Thomas's house, and went with her to the Twilight Motel. He told detectives he did not know why he had killed Suzanne and Eugene. He later told the mental health experts that he had killed the boy so that he could rejoin his mother, according to one AP account; another AP version of the same report said he told them he killed the child to reunite him with his mother.
Suzanne Henry's body was found at 4:20 p.m. on December 23. Within a short time, the sheriff's office had enough evidence to arrest her husband. Detectives Fay Wilber and William McNulty tracked him to the Twilight Motel, where he was staying in a room with Rosa Mae Thomas, and arrested him shortly after midnight. Wilber read him his rights and asked about Eugene. Henry said he did not know where the boy was.
There was one remark at the motel that came up in court years later. At a suppression hearing before the 1992 retrial, Wilber testified that he had said, in Rosa Thomas's presence, "If [Henry] has done something to that child, he needs to die." Before the first trial he had said he did not remember making the statement, though McNulty and Thomas both testified that he had said something that could be taken as a threat. Henry argued that the remark frightened him into talking. The Florida Supreme Court disagreed, reasoning that such a remark was more likely to keep a suspect quiet, and that Henry did not confess until hours later.
Henry was taken to the sheriff's office in Dade City and placed in a conference room about ten feet by twenty, with one wrist handcuffed to a chair. He was allowed to smoke and drink coffee. Because Wilber had known Henry for years, it was decided that he would do the questioning.
While Wilber went for coffee, McNulty tried to talk to Henry to "establish a rapport." He said he understood that Henry had "done some time before." Henry answered: "I am not saying nothing to you. Besides, you ain't read me nothing yet." McNulty reminded him that he had been read his rights at the motel and asked him two or three times where Eugene was. When Wilber came back, he read Henry his rights again and Henry agreed to talk.
They talked for more than three hours, with Wilber out of the room for perhaps an hour and a half of that time. Henry did not confess. Finally Wilber stood up and said he would have to go and find Eugene without Henry's help. Then Henry said the boy was in Plant City. Wilber asked whether he was alive. Henry said he was not, and offered to take the officers to him.
Wilber drove him there. According to news reports of Wilber's trial testimony, the officers finally saw the boy's "two small feet" in the underbrush after dawn, and Henry "started crying." "He was crying and he held on to me," Wilber said. Eugene had been stabbed five times in the neck. Henry was taken back to Dade City, read his rights once more, and gave a full confession to both killings.
The scratches on Henry's arm, which he said were knife wounds from Suzanne, became evidence against him. Wilber testified that they did not look like knife cuts and looked more like the marks a person gets from crawling through briars and brush, like the brush where Eugene's body was found. An officer had photographed the wounds but threw the photographs away because they were unclear.
Henry was indicted on one count of first-degree murder in each county: in Hillsborough County on January 15, 1986, for Eugene Christian, and in Pasco County on January 16, 1986, for Suzanne Henry. Because the killings took place in different counties, they were tried separately, before different judges and juries.
The Hillsborough trial for Eugene's death came first. The defense gave notice of an insanity defense and had two experts who concluded that Henry was legally insane when he killed the boy. Two court-appointed doctors, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, found him sane. The state then asked for an examination by its own expert. On his lawyers' instructions, Henry refused, and when he refused a second time after the judge ordered him to submit, the judge struck the insanity defense. At trial, the defense experts were limited to arguing that he could not form a premeditated intent.
The jury found Henry guilty on April 11, 1987, of both premeditated and felony murder, with kidnapping as the underlying felony, and recommended death by a vote of ten to two. The judge found four aggravating factors: the 1976 second-degree murder conviction; that the killing happened during a kidnapping; that it was committed to avoid arrest; and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. He also found that Henry had been under extreme mental or emotional disturbance and that his capacity to conform his conduct to the law was substantially impaired. He sentenced Henry to death. Court records give the date of sentence as April 15, 1987; a 2006 Florida Supreme Court opinion gives it as November 15, 1987.
The Pasco trial for Suzanne's death followed. Henry was represented by Robert Focht. At one hearing Henry addressed the court himself and asked for a new lawyer, saying witnesses on his behalf had not been called and that "it being partiality shown towards the victim." The jury found him guilty on April 22, 1987, and two days later recommended death 12 to 0. At the penalty phase Berland and Afield testified for the defense. Judge Ray Ulmer found three aggravating factors, including that the killing was cold, calculated and premeditated, found no mitigation, and sentenced Henry to death on May 8, 1987.
On January 3, 1991, the Florida Supreme Court reversed both convictions, in two opinions issued the same day.
The Pasco case was the simpler of the two. The court held that the jury had heard far too much about Eugene's death: the search for his body, the details of how he was killed, and an eight-by-fourteen-inch color autopsy photograph that the court said might by itself have been enough to prejudice the jury. Some reference to the boy was needed to explain the investigation and his absence as a witness, the court said, but the rest was unnecessary. Because the evidence could support a lesser degree of homicide, the error was not harmless. The court also said that the cold, calculated and premeditated finding could not stand on that record.
The Hillsborough case divided the court. A majority held that Henry's remark to McNulty did not require the police to stop questioning him, since he appeared to be refusing to talk to McNulty in particular, and that the judge had been entitled to strike the insanity defense. But Chief Justice Shaw and Justices Barkett and Kogan would have suppressed the confession, and Justice McDonald, joined by Barkett, would have found that striking the insanity defense was an abuse of discretion, given that the state already had two experts who had found Henry sane. Because a majority of the justices found reversible error, though for different reasons, the court reversed and ordered a new trial.
Henry was retried for Suzanne's death in Pasco County in October 1991, with a new lawyer, Richard Howard. The judge kept out the in-depth evidence about the search for Eugene, the autopsy photo and the manner of his death, but allowed the jury to hear that Eugene had been in the house, had gone missing, that Henry led police to his body and that he confessed. Howard argued self-defense, based on Henry's account that Suzanne attacked him with a knife, and asked the jury for a verdict of second-degree murder on the theory that Henry had killed in a blind rage without premeditation. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder on October 11, 1991.
At the penalty phase Howard chose not to call Berland and Afield again, judging that their earlier testimony, especially Afield's statement that Henry was very dangerous, had done more harm than good. Instead he called Rosa Mae Thomas and her daughter. Thomas testified that Suzanne had come to her home several times to argue with Henry, and that on one occasion she attacked him and police had to pull her off him and arrest her. She said Henry was a loving man and a good provider. Her daughter said she had never been afraid of him, though she knew he had killed before. Both described his use of crack cocaine. The state called experts who said he was not under the influence of cocaine at the time of the killing.
The state also presented the Roddy killing in detail, including a transcript of Deborah Fuller's testimony from an earlier proceeding, since Fuller was by then incarcerated in another state, and testimony about Roddy's autopsy. The jury again recommended death unanimously, and on October 18, 1991, the judge sentenced Henry to death, finding the prior violent felony and that the killing was especially cruel, and no mitigation.
The Hillsborough retrial for Eugene's death took place in August 1992, with Henry represented by a lawyer named Fuente and a co-counsel, Mr. Wells. The defense, with Henry's consent, made an unusual choice. Fuente put Henry on the stand and had him tell the jury himself that he had stabbed Patricia Roddy, that he had served only half his sentence, and that he was already under a death sentence for killing Suzanne. Fuente later explained that he expected a conviction and wanted the jury to hear everything at the start, so that nothing new would surprise them at the penalty phase.
The prosecutor, Mr. Castillo, was taken aback and asked the judge to confirm that the door had been opened. "No question," Fuente said. On cross-examination the prosecutor had Henry agree that, with Eugene, the number of people killed "at your hand" was three. He then argued that the motive for killing Eugene was to keep the boy, who knew him, from identifying him, because Henry had already been to prison for Roddy's death and did not want to go back. "Who wants to go to prison?" Henry answered. Asked whether he had made a choice between his freedom and Eugene's life, he said: "No, sir, it wasn't a choice. That was something that happened that shouldn't never have happened." Henry testified that he had been worried, when he saw the lights behind him, that the police would find his cocaine, and that he had intended to turn himself in for Suzanne's death.
The jury found him guilty on August 28, 1992, and recommended death 11 to 1. The judge found two aggravating factors, the prior capital felony and the kidnapping, gave some weight to two statutory and six other mitigating factors (among them that Henry had turned himself in for Roddy's death, cooperated with the police, behaved well in jail, had been good to Eugene while the boy was alive and was truly remorseful), and sentenced him to death on October 16, 1992.
On December 15, 1994, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed both convictions and both death sentences. It rejected, among other claims, the argument that a death sentence was disproportionate for a killing that grew out of a domestic dispute. Justice Kogan, joined by Justice Shaw, said he still believed the confession should have been suppressed but was bound by the court's earlier ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the cases in 1995.
Henry's postconviction lawyers then argued that his retrial lawyers had failed him. In the Pasco case, they said Howard should have presented an insanity or intoxication defense and called the mental health experts at sentencing. A circuit judge held a hearing in November 2001 and denied relief, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed on October 9, 2003, finding Howard's choices to be reasonable strategy. Henry's federal habeas petition, filed in January 2004, was denied by a federal district court in May 2006, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in June 2007. In that appeal, the court noted Mosman's opinion that Henry had a mental age of 13 or 14 and Howard's testimony that he "vigorously" disagreed, because Henry could discuss adult concepts far better than a 13-year-old.
In the Hillsborough case, the central claim was Fuente's decision to have Henry tell the jury about his other killings. A judge held a hearing in October 2003 and denied relief in December 2003. On October 12, 2006, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the strategy was a considered choice made by an experienced lawyer with his client's consent. The court was not unanimous. Justice Anstead dissented, calling it "an unusual and troubling case" in which counsel had put before the jury damaging facts that otherwise would have been inadmissible and handed the prosecution its motive, and Justice Pariente wrote that she agreed counsel had not performed as the Sixth Amendment requires, though she concurred in the result. A federal district court denied habeas relief in the Hillsborough case on February 4, 2011.
None of these proceedings raised a claim that Henry was intellectually disabled. The U.S. Supreme Court had barred the execution of intellectually disabled people in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, but Florida courts required a prisoner to show an IQ score of 70 or below before presenting other evidence, and Henry's only recorded score was 78.
Governor Rick Scott signed Henry's death warrant on May 2, 2014, for the murder of Suzanne Henry, and set the execution for 6 p.m. on June 18. The Florida Supreme Court ordered that all circuit court proceedings be completed by May 19, and the Pasco circuit court set a filing deadline of May 9.
Henry's lawyer, Baya Harrison III, did not file a new postconviction motion. On May 7 he asked the governor instead to have Henry examined under a Florida law that halts an execution if the prisoner does not understand the nature and effect of the death penalty and why it is being imposed. Scott granted the request on May 12 and appointed three psychiatrists, Dr. Wade C. Myers, Dr. Donald Taylor and Dr. Tonia Werner. Their report, dated May 16, found Henry fully oriented, with his memory and concentration intact. He scored in the average range on a standard cognitive screening test and, asked to subtract seven repeatedly from 100, got four of five steps right. He told them he had been convicted of first-degree murder, named his victims as his wife and stepson, gave the general facts of their deaths, and said he would be executed by "lethal injection," "a shot," on June 18 at 6 p.m. The psychiatrists concluded that he had no psychiatric illness or intellectual disability and understood his sentence. On May 20 the governor lifted the temporary stay.
On May 27, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Hall v. Florida. It held that Florida could not treat an IQ score above 70 as the end of the inquiry: when a score falls within the test's margin of error, the prisoner must be allowed to present other evidence of intellectual disability, including evidence about deficits in everyday functioning.
Three days later, on May 30, Harrison filed a motion asking the Pasco court to find Henry intellectually disabled. It argued that Henry's "abhorrent childhood, extensive personal and family mental health history, poor social adjustment, and lack of rational thinking and reasoning skills so impaired his adaptive functioning that he was actually performing at the level of a person with an IQ of 70." The circuit court dismissed it the same day as untimely, because it came after the May 19 deadline.
On June 12 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed, but on the merits. Florida law defines intellectual disability as significantly subaverage intellectual functioning together with deficits in adaptive behavior, appearing before age 18. Beyond the single score of 78, the court said, Henry had not alleged any deficits in adaptive functioning or any onset before 18, and in all the years of litigation not one doctor had ever said he was intellectually disabled. The record showed the opposite, the court said: Henry drove, kept relationships, handled money and engaged in goal-directed behavior, and his own written and spoken arguments showed he could communicate and understood the law. It quoted his 1987 request for a new lawyer as an example. Justice Lewis concurred in the result, and Justice Quince was recused.
A week earlier, on June 5, Henry had sent the Eleventh Circuit a letter of his own asking every judge on the court to stop his execution because his juries had been made up of "a majority of white" jurors rather than "persons of color," and asking that juries be required to have six white jurors and six jurors of color. The court did not accept it, because a represented party cannot file on his own behalf.
On June 14 Harrison asked the Eleventh Circuit for permission to file a second federal habeas petition based on Hall. The application said Henry had never been evaluated by any expert specifically to decide whether he was intellectually disabled. It also restated Mosman's view that Henry functioned at a mental age of 13 or 14, "equivalent to a person with an IQ of 70."
On June 17, a day before the execution, a panel denied the request two to one. Judge Marcus, joined by Judge Pryor, held that Hall was a new rule of constitutional law that the Supreme Court had not made retroactive to cases like Henry's, and that even if it were, Henry had not made enough of a showing of intellectual disability to justify further proceedings, given the 2014 psychiatric findings and the record the Florida Supreme Court had described. Judge Martin dissented. She would not have decided the retroactivity question under the pressure of an imminent execution, without full briefing and without the state having even filed a response, and she doubted the majority's answer to it. Henry's allegations, she wrote, did "not clearly establish" that he was intellectually disabled, but because he said he had never had an evaluation for that purpose, she could not say there was no reasonable likelihood that he could prove it. She would have stayed the execution so that a district court could decide.
Henry's was one of the first executions in the United States after the failed lethal injection of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on April 29, 2014, which had led to a seven-week pause in executions nationwide. Georgia executed Marcus Wellons on the night of June 17 and Missouri executed John Winfield early on June 18. Florida, which had kept to its schedule, used a three-drug protocol beginning with the sedative midazolam, followed by vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Asked about the state's procedures the day before, Scott said he had to "uphold the laws of the land."
On his last day Henry met with relatives and a Catholic spiritual adviser and declined a last meal, according to the Department of Corrections. His family did not attend the execution. In a statement, they said they were grateful that the long case was coming to an end. Outside the prison, a friend of his from England, Joan Careford, waited for word.
The execution was delayed past its scheduled 6 p.m. start while the U.S. Supreme Court considered a final appeal, which it denied. Inside the witness room, members of Suzanne Henry's family sat in the front row. Among the witnesses was Major Ed Beckman of the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, who had been a 20-year-old detention deputy in December 1985. "It was around Christmas and those events kind of stick out a little bit," he told the AP before the execution. "I want to be there for the sake of the victims, just to be there for them."
Henry lay strapped to a bed, covered with a white sheet to his neck. In his last statement he asked forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ. "I can't undo what I've done. If I could, I would. I ask for your forgiveness if you can find it in your heart," he said. The execution began at 7:30 p.m. He was pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m. He was 63. It was the 18th execution in Florida under Scott and the third in the United States in less than 24 hours, and it appeared to go normally.
Selena Geiger, Suzanne's niece, was 38 when she watched the execution. She said she felt no sympathy for him and that his apology meant nothing to her. "We have some closure," she said. "Justice has finally been done."
The Eleventh Circuit's ruling on whether Hall v. Florida applied to second federal petitions was, by Judge Martin's account, a question of first impression that no court had yet addressed, and it was decided in Henry's case the day before he died.
Patricia Roddy's relationship to Henry: girlfriend (Tampa Bay Times), common-law wife (AP) or first wife (court opinions). No source found for this page gives a marriage date.
The year of Roddy's death: most sources say 1976; the prosecutor at the 1992 retrial and a 2014 WTXL report say 1975.
Henry's plea for Roddy's death: guilty (Florida Supreme Court, 1994 and 2014) or no contest (Florida Supreme Court, 2006; AP). Reuters described it as manslaughter, which no court record supports.
Whether Roddy's children were in the car: the Tampa Bay Times reported that they were and that one begged him to stop; Henry testified in 1992 that they were not.
Self-defense: Henry said Suzanne cut him first with a kitchen knife. A detective testified that his scratches looked like briar marks, and the jury rejected self-defense. His girlfriend testified that Suzanne had been violent toward him on other occasions; that testimony came from the defense and was not tested against other evidence in the sources.
Why he killed Eugene: Henry said he did not know, and told experts he wanted to reunite with or send the boy to his mother (AP accounts differ on the wording). The prosecution argued he killed the boy to eliminate a witness; that theory was argued to the 1992 jury, but the courts did not adopt it as a finding (the avoid-arrest aggravator found in 1987 was not found again in 1992).
Intellectual disability: Henry's lawyers said he functioned like a person with an IQ of 70 and a mental age of 13 or 14. No court found him intellectually disabled, no doctor ever diagnosed it, and the 2014 panel found that he had no such disability. Judge Martin's dissent said only that he deserved a chance to try to prove it.
His childhood: the claims of abuse, brain injury and early hallucinations come from defense filings and were never the subject of findings beyond the 1992 mitigator for a childhood fall and brain injury.
Henry was executed on June 18, 2014. His convictions for all three killings stood at his death. No later court proceedings concerning his case appear in the sources found for this page.
January 16, 1951: John Ruthell Henry is born (Commission on Capital Cases record).
1976 (1975 in some accounts): Henry stabs Patricia Roddy to death in a car; he turns himself in, pleads to second-degree murder and receives a 15-year sentence.
1983: He is released on parole after about seven and a half years.
December 22, 1985: Henry stabs his estranged wife, Suzanne Henry, at her home in Zephyrhills, takes her son, Eugene Christian, 5, and kills him about nine hours later near Plant City.
December 23, 1985, 4:20 p.m.: Suzanne Henry's body is found.
December 24, 1985: Henry is arrested at the Twilight Motel shortly after midnight, leads detectives to Eugene's body after dawn and confesses to both killings.
January 15 and 16, 1986: He is indicted for first-degree murder in Hillsborough and Pasco counties.
April 1987: Hillsborough jury convicts him of Eugene's murder (April 11) and recommends death 10 to 2; he is sentenced to death.
April 22 and May 8, 1987: Pasco jury convicts him of Suzanne's murder; recommendation 12 to 0; sentenced to death.
January 3, 1991: Florida Supreme Court reverses both convictions.
October 11 and 18, 1991: Pasco retrial; guilty, 12 to 0, death.
August 28 to October 16, 1992: Hillsborough retrial; guilty, 11 to 1, death.
December 15, 1994: Florida Supreme Court affirms both death sentences; U.S. Supreme Court declines review in 1995.
October 9, 2003: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of postconviction relief in the Pasco case.
October 12, 2006: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of postconviction relief in the Hillsborough case, with one dissent.
June 27, 2007: Eleventh Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief in the Pasco case.
February 4, 2011: Federal district court denies habeas relief in the Hillsborough case.
May 2, 2014: Governor Rick Scott signs the death warrant.
May 16, 2014: Three psychiatrists report that Henry has no mental illness or intellectual disability and understands his sentence.
May 27, 2014: U.S. Supreme Court decides Hall v. Florida.
May 30, 2014: Henry's intellectual-disability motion is dismissed as untimely.
June 12, 2014: Florida Supreme Court affirms the dismissal.
June 17, 2014: Eleventh Circuit denies leave for a second federal petition, 2 to 1.
June 18, 2014: The U.S. Supreme Court denies a final appeal; Henry is executed at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m.